The Confidence-Man, by Herman Melville

Chapter xxiii.

In which the Powerful Effect of Natural Scenery is Evinced in the Case of the Missourian, Who, in View of the
Region Round-About Cairo, has a Return of His Chilly Fit.

At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business;
that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack — his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don
Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up
the mephitic breeze with zest.

In the dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fire-flies, the boat now lies before Cairo. She has
landed certain passengers, and tarries for the coming of expected ones. Leaning over the rail on the inshore side, the
Missourian eyes through the dubious medium that swampy and squalid domain; and over it audibly mumbles his cynical mind
to himself, as Apermantus’ dog may have mumbled his bone. He bethinks him that the man with the brass-plate was to land
on this villainous bank, and for that cause, if no other, begins to suspect him. Like one beginning to rouse himself
from a dose of chloroform treacherously given, he half divines, too, that he, the philosopher, had unwittingly been
betrayed into being an unphilosophical dupe. To what vicissitudes of light and shade is man subject! He ponders the
mystery of human subjectivity in general. He thinks he perceives with Crossbones, his favorite author, that, as one may
wake up well in the morning, very well, indeed, and brisk as a buck, I thank you, but ere bed-time get under the
weather, there is no telling how — so one may wake up wise, and slow of assent, very wise and very slow, I assure you,
and for all that, before night, by like trick in the atmosphere, be left in the lurch a ninny. Health and wisdom
equally precious, and equally little as unfluctuating possessions to be relied on.

But where was slipped in the entering wedge? Philosophy, knowledge, experience — were those trusty knights of the
castle recreant? No, but unbeknown to them, the enemy stole on the castle’s south side, its genial one, where
Suspicion, the warder, parleyed. In fine, his too indulgent, too artless and companionable nature betrayed him.
Admonished by which, he thinks he must be a little splenetic in his intercourse henceforth.

He revolves the crafty process of sociable chat, by which, as he fancies, the man with the brass-plate wormed into
him, and made such a fool of him as insensibly to persuade him to waive, in his exceptional case, that general law of
distrust systematically applied to the race. He revolves, but cannot comprehend, the operation, still less the
operator. Was the man a trickster, it must be more for the love than the lucre. Two or three dirty dollars the motive
to so many nice wiles? And yet how full of mean needs his seeming. Before his mental vision the person of that
threadbare Talleyrand, that impoverished Machiavelli, that seedy Rosicrucian — for something of all these he vaguely
deems him — passes now in puzzled review. Fain, in his disfavor, would he make out a logical case. The doctrine of
analogies recurs. Fallacious enough doctrine when wielded against one’s prejudices, but in corroboration of cherished
suspicions not without likelihood. Analogically, he couples the slanting cut of the equivocator’s coat-tails with the
sinister cast in his eye; he weighs slyboot’s sleek speech in the light imparted by the oblique import of the smooth
slope of his worn boot-heels; the insinuator’s undulating flunkyisms dovetail into those of the flunky beast that
windeth his way on his belly.

From these uncordial reveries he is roused by a cordial slap on the shoulder, accompanied by a spicy volume of
tobacco-smoke, out of which came a voice, sweet as a seraph’s: